Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1: Containing Sixteen Experimental Investigations from the Harvard Psychological Laboratory.
Science
Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1: Containing Sixteen Experimental Investigations from the Harvard Psychological Laboratory.
Psychology, Experimental
It will be remembered also that in these experiments, where the
judgment of distance was based directly on the cutaneous impression,
the underestimation of the short, filled distance was lessened and
even turned into an overestimation, by giving greater distinctness to
the end points, in allowing them to come in contact with the skin just
before or just after the filling. The results here are again the same
as before. The tendency to underestimate is lessened by this device.
Whenever, then, a filled space is made up of points which are
distinctly perceived as discrete--and this is shown in the longer
curves by the comparative accuracy with which the points are
located--these spaces are overestimated.
In all of these experiments on localization, the judgments were given
with open eyes, by naming the visual points under which the tactual
points seemed to lie. I have already spoken of the other method which
I also employed. This consisted in marking points on paper which
seemed to correspond in number and position to the points on the skin.
During this process the eyes were kept closed. This may appear to be a
very crude way of getting at the illusion, but from a large number of
judgments which show a surprising consistency I received the emphatic
confirmation of my previous conclusion, that filled spaces were
overestimated. These experiments were valuable also from the fact that
here the cutaneous space was estimated by the muscle sense, or active
touch, as it is called.
In the experiments so far described the filling in of the closed space
was always made by means of stationary points. I shall now give a
brief account of some experiments which I regard as very important for
the theory that I shall advance later. Here the filling was made by
means of a point drawn over the skin from one end of a two-point
distance to the other.
These experiments were made on four different parts of the skin--the
forehead, the back of the hand, the abdomen, and the leg between the
knee and the thigh. I here forsook the plan which I had followed
almost exclusively hitherto, that of comparing the cutaneous distances
with each other directly. The judgments now were secured indirectly
through the medium of visual distances. There was placed before the
subject a gray card, upon which were put a series of two-point
distances ranging from 2 to 20 cm. The two-point distances were given
on the skin, and the subject then selected from the optical distances
the one that appeared equal to the cutaneous distance. This process
furnished the judgments on open spaces. For the filled spaces,
immediately after the two-point distance was given a blunt stylus was
drawn from one point to the other, and the subject then again selected
the optical distance which seemed equal to this distance filled by the
moving point.
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